 "Online rental classifieds firm Grabhouse expands to seven more cities")
Online rental accommodations classifieds platform Grabhouse has expanded its operations in seven new cities, taking its total coverage to 11 cities across India.
The broker-free platform expanded in seven cities in the past seven days: Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Kolkata and Chennai. It had been already operational in Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad.
Co-founded in 2013 by Prateek Shukla and Pankhuri Shrivastava, both engineers and passionate coders, Grabhouse’s objective is to make house hunting/renting a hassle-free experience through technology. It provides rental listings of flats and paying guest accommodations.
Grabhouse has a two-way revenue strategy. While a customer gets any two recommendations free of cost, he/she has to pay to get details of the rest eight. In case if the customer requires additional offline assistance like a neighbourhood specialist, a premium fee is charged upon the closure of the deal. Customers are often charged between Rs 99-2,000 for leads while the offline assistance fee can be upto Rs 8,000.
“The convenience level that e-commerce has brought in purchasing is lacking in real estate segment. A good chunk of the entire process of finding a property or a house is still offline. What we try to bring in is the convenience by assisting an individual in the entire process of searching for a rented house/accommodation,” said Shrivastava.
The Bengaluru-based technology-driven platform has a recommendation engine where the back-end technology provides 10 best suggestions based on a customer’s requirements. The website also provides other information, including photos, locality details, etc.
Grabhouse looks to organise the realty space by bringing in more offline properties listings through various channels, including social media monitoring and society managers.
The online real estate space has become a hotspot for investors and entrepreneurs. Ventures like Housing.com, Indiaproperty.com, Commonfloor.com, 99acres.com, magicbricks.com and PropTiger.com already playing big in the space. The competitors of Grabhouse include online brokerage-free marketplaces Nestaway, Nobroker.in, Eezyrent, Zocalo.in and Flatchat. Nestaway had recently raised $12 million from Flipkart and Tiger Global.
The two-year old company has helped about one million customers to find rentals. Currently, it has revenue of about Rs 40 lakhs per month. The revenue is growing at 200 per cent month-on-month, Shrivastava said. Currently, Grabhouse gets about 3.5 million unique visits per month.
She added the company is looking to add reviews also to the platform where residents of an area or a building can provide information on the safety and other aspects of a locality.
Grabhouse has a strict broker-free policy in place. To ensure this, the company had developed a tool before launching the website through which all broker details were collected and blocked. Currently, it has about 200,000 brokers blocked on the platform. Grabhouse also encourages users to identify brokers. Often, users are incentivised to report a broker
It had raised $2.5 million from Sequoia and Kalaari Capital in Series A funding in January, before which it was backed by India Quotient.
According to a July report by India Brand Equity Foundation, the Indian real estate market size is expected to touch $180 billion by 2020. Housing segment alone contributes about five-six per cent to India’s GDP while the real estate sector is the second major contributor. The report observed that real estate has emerged as the second most active sector, raising $ 1.2 billion from private equity investors in the last 10 months.
The broker-free platform expanded in seven cities in the past seven days: Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Kolkata and Chennai. It had been already operational in Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai and Hyderabad.
Co-founded in 2013 by Prateek Shukla and Pankhuri Shrivastava, both engineers and passionate coders, Grabhouse’s objective is to make house hunting/renting a hassle-free experience through technology. It provides rental listings of flats and paying guest accommodations.
Grabhouse has a two-way revenue strategy. While a customer gets any two recommendations free of cost, he/she has to pay to get details of the rest eight. In case if the customer requires additional offline assistance like a neighbourhood specialist, a premium fee is charged upon the closure of the deal. Customers are often charged between Rs 99-2,000 for leads while the offline assistance fee can be upto Rs 8,000.
“The convenience level that e-commerce has brought in purchasing is lacking in real estate segment. A good chunk of the entire process of finding a property or a house is still offline. What we try to bring in is the convenience by assisting an individual in the entire process of searching for a rented house/accommodation,” said Shrivastava.
The Bengaluru-based technology-driven platform has a recommendation engine where the back-end technology provides 10 best suggestions based on a customer’s requirements. The website also provides other information, including photos, locality details, etc.
Grabhouse looks to organise the realty space by bringing in more offline properties listings through various channels, including social media monitoring and society managers.
The online real estate space has become a hotspot for investors and entrepreneurs. Ventures like Housing.com, Indiaproperty.com, Commonfloor.com, 99acres.com, magicbricks.com and PropTiger.com already playing big in the space. The competitors of Grabhouse include online brokerage-free marketplaces Nestaway, Nobroker.in, Eezyrent, Zocalo.in and Flatchat. Nestaway had recently raised $12 million from Flipkart and Tiger Global.
The two-year old company has helped about one million customers to find rentals. Currently, it has revenue of about Rs 40 lakhs per month. The revenue is growing at 200 per cent month-on-month, Shrivastava said. Currently, Grabhouse gets about 3.5 million unique visits per month.
She added the company is looking to add reviews also to the platform where residents of an area or a building can provide information on the safety and other aspects of a locality.
Grabhouse has a strict broker-free policy in place. To ensure this, the company had developed a tool before launching the website through which all broker details were collected and blocked. Currently, it has about 200,000 brokers blocked on the platform. Grabhouse also encourages users to identify brokers. Often, users are incentivised to report a broker
It had raised $2.5 million from Sequoia and Kalaari Capital in Series A funding in January, before which it was backed by India Quotient.
According to a July report by India Brand Equity Foundation, the Indian real estate market size is expected to touch $180 billion by 2020. Housing segment alone contributes about five-six per cent to India’s GDP while the real estate sector is the second major contributor. The report observed that real estate has emerged as the second most active sector, raising $ 1.2 billion from private equity investors in the last 10 months.